Future Sense: Five explorations of whole intelligence for a world that’s waking up

Copyright © 2015 Malcolm Parlett

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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

This book is dedicated to the memory of Bjørg Tofte (1943–2011), whose spirit, style, love, and courage have inspired me throughout its journey to completion.

I offer the book in fulfilment of my promise, shortly before she died, that I would write what was inside me to write.

Table of Contents

Context

Chapter 1    Points Of Departure

Chapter 2    The Five Explorations Map

Chapter 3    Responding To The Situation

Chapter 4    Interrelating

Chapter 5    Embodying

Chapter 6    Self-Recognising

Chapter 7    Experimenting

Chapter 8    Returning To Base

Postscript and Appreciations

‘… the idea of the future being different from the present is so repugnant to our conventional modes of thought and behavior that we, most of us, offer a great resistance to acting on it in practice.’

John Maynard Keynes, 1937

Context

Being alive today, we realise that revolutions are underway – if not everywhere on the streets, at least across the field of human thought. In this book, we shall recognise what we deeply know already – as we say, ‘in our bones’ or ‘through our own experience’ or ‘from time immemorial’. We shall also throw light on what passes as ‘normal’ – the usual thinking of society and the assumptions people live by, often unaware that they are doing so. These matters are also subject to change, in a revolutionary direction.

In Britain, as in a number of other countries, with economic advantages and no war on our actual doorstep, a settled narrative for decades was one of material development, economic growth, and expansion of possibilities. But this narrative has faltered – some will say shattered. A sustainable but expanding economy while meeting carbon-reduction targets is unlikely. We know that climate change is serious, is already happening, and is set to worsen. Prospects of violent conflict re-stimulate past collective traumas in ways too horrific to contemplate. Political upheavals add to a sense of confusion and uncertainty. Not surprisingly, statistics show increases in depression, suicide, and severe mental illness. And the question for many becomes ‘Will the centre hold?’.

Staying sane, holding our own centre, and expanding the possibilities of our own lives become high priorities. They are central themes for the book: our own ‘future sense’, woven into the fabric of a bigger tapestry.

We need to remember that, despite the gloom, upward and hopeful trends also multiply: public campaigns are forcing change and greater transparency, extreme poverty has declined globally, and climate imperatives are finally becoming urgent. Huge, once-unaccountable companies and institutions are under pressure. Corruption is identified more assiduously. Multiple issues of social and international injustice are receiving more attention. Social enterprises are expanding. There is also creative energy right across the arts. Most hopeful of all, perhaps, is the ever-growing understanding of the intimate connections between things, a grand joining of the dots – between agriculture and food, food and health, physical health and emotional well-being, adult emotions and child development, childcare and the social pressures on young parents, work stress and the dominant economic model, economics and politics … the list could go on indefinitely.

So while the unsettlement is deep, there are also indications of a growing, highly creative, expanding global consciousness – a collective reaching for deeper understanding. The world is waking up.

Future Sense starts from an awareness of these new currents in human thought, and seeks to contribute to them, indeed to move them in a particular direction. Human beings live in the middle of what is happening around them. We always have, of course, but now the village is global; being neighbours can mean living in the same continent; ‘neighbours on line’ are scattered worldwide. Inescapably, the distances between global issues, local events, and personal lives are shrinking. Moreover, it is dawning on nearly all of us that the most central and relevant factor in determining the future is the human dimension. In every global problem, every policy dilemma, every disputed boundary, or every climate conference the capacity of human beings to act tellingly and cooperatively is acutely relevant.

Thus, rather than spotlighting the world’s issues as if they stand apart from people’s lives, Future Sense focuses on human beings themselves – or ourselves (I shall use both forms). As members of Homo sapiens alive today, we – along with our predecessors – have created and perpetuated our various global problems. Now, with our predecessors gone, it is left to the generations of us alive today to find solutions. It is an awesome realisation – and some would-be readers will put the book down at the thought of it.

In Future Sense, however, the emphasis is not on what we cannot do, but on what we can – beginning not from a desperate or panicked state, but from a place of clarity and self-confidence. We explore in this book five directions we can take – not just for the future of our species, or the state of the planet, though these are important enough – but also for our own benefit and development. Maintaining our sanity in a crazy-seeming world is often a challenge; living a ‘good life’ is a difficult balancing act; and the complexity of the world reflects the complexities of our own lives – on- and off-line. Our own state of existence is the necessary starting point: if we are to be a resource for humanity, we need to discover our own resources, many of which may be hidden away in cupboards long unopened.

The argument here is that the greater fulfilment of our talents, potentialities, and unique gifts is a direct way of changing the world at the ultimate grassroots. The quality of our own being-in-the-world is relevant as never before in human history.

*

Like any book, Future Sense has roots in its author’s own history – and in this case, these are entangled with its contents.

I began post-graduate life as an experimental psychologist in the Psychological Laboratory at Cambridge. I was studying hearing and short-term memory, devising experiments, and conducting them with student volunteers in a soundproof room. I gave it my all, but I was increasingly unhappy – at odds with the whole model of working, and also encountering my own insecurities. Focusing on specific hypotheses, working in isolated conditions, and wearing the symbolic attire of a white lab coat, I had to exclude from view a whole range of ‘outside’ influences on people’s behaviour, despite my conviction that these were significant. Straying off-piste was impossible: research occurred on the ski run of experimental orthodoxy. I knew I had to change the direction of my life.

At this point, I was lucky in my choice of colleagues and in the way doors opened for me. I realised that human development and learning lay at the heart of my interests, and over an eight-year period, alternating between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Edinburgh University, I was able to pursue studies along ‘natural history’ lines, following inquiries wherever they needed to go, and building connections between research in applied social psychology and policy-making. I taught myself a form of mainly qualitative research, wrestling with the complexities of human systems. The focus of my attention was the ‘teaching and learning milieu’ in higher education – the point at which the academic system meets the lives of students, transmits knowledge, develops intellectual skills, and immerses bright young people in departmental and college life. The rigour of the work was different from research life in the laboratory, but no less demanding. Like an anthropologist or historian, I needed to make sense of a mass of information, extract meaning, harness evidence, and present what I discovered to those most critically involved – including university teachers, senior administrators, and students themselves.

My second career move – sideways but still within the broad field of psychology – began nearly a decade later. I encountered, by chance more than choice, the ‘gestalt’ discipline,¹ and, participating with curiosity and having discovered its thoroughbred nature, I realised it was what I had long been seeking. I saw the way it revealed human experience and went to the deep centre of things, sometimes in a matter of minutes. It opened me to an entirely new way of thinking and of relating to other people.

The German word Gestalt doesn’t translate well, but roughly speaking it means a ‘whole configuration’. Thus, we see a house directly as a house, not as a collection of windows, roof, garden gate, and drainpipes, which we somehow put together in order to see the house as a whole: we see it at once as a totality, as a gestalt. We are ‘wired’ to take in the world in its organised complexities, as a series of wholes. The gestalt approach stays as near as possible to how human beings experience their reality, and the ways they construct their ‘lifeworld’. We are pattern-makers as well as pattern-finders, so to gestalt is an active verb as well – forming parts into wholes, sorting items into more complex and meaningful organisations of experience.

The gestalt holistic approach has infiltrated my thinking – as becomes evident here, with the focus of this book being on ‘whole intelligence’. Gestalt philosophy leans in the opposite direction to splitting things up into their parts, which is the way in which reductionist science proceeds – with its attention to atoms, elements, cells and genes, and to methods that focus on breaking down complex matters into simpler forms. Gestalt rejects this approach, believing that it depicts a world shorn of much of the complexity, relevance, and troubling unanswerable questions that human beings actually have to face: broken down into its constituent parts, the everyday world as it presents itself to us becomes unrecognisable. Reductionist science has obviously been extraordinarily successful – but for many practical purposes it is too far removed from the ‘natural’ ways in which people experience reality to be of practical use. Gestalt offers a re-balancing philosophy that opens doors to lived experience that most scientists are trained to keep locked – sometimes throwing away the key as well.

Stimulated by my first encounters with gestalt thinking – so different from my experimental psychology education – I found my wider research interests beginning to shift. Over a ten-year transitional period, I moved from intensive studies of education, and international work as a consultant and an evaluator of programmes, to going through a gestalt training in America and eventually to practising in my native Britain as a gestalt therapist, coach, and consultant, and subsequently as a gestalt trainer, journal editor, and writer myself.

In moving into this new phase of my career I was working with people across a broader spectrum, more ‘whole-life’ than in higher education. Yet I realised that gestalt practitioners were in the business of educating too: assisting people to become more effective, authentic, alive, and mindful. As I became a more experienced gestalt practitioner, one area began to stand out prominently: the range and depth of people’s intrinsic strengths and skills. Although people might have disturbed lives and could experience distress, almost all had developed strategies for managing their lives. They had learned ways to handle conflicts with partners or to cope with stress, and they were capable of bypassing ‘neurotic disturbances’ or incorporating them into some inspiring life-direction. I grew more respectful of what people had learned about how to live, and how they experienced feeling more competent and connected when in solidarity with others. I also realised that everyone can ‘lose it’, and feel incompetent and isolated at times, especially given adverse conditions or contexts that undermine their joie de vivre.

*

From experiences along my journey, I have assembled the ideas, anecdotes, stories, and case histories of Future Sense, drawing on both professional and personal life. Inevitably, I draw a lot from other people’s thinking, but the selection is my own. I have eavesdropped on specialist conversations ranging from ecology to peace studies; neurobiology to the history of ideas; existential philosophy to management studies. My main debt is to gestalt thinking within the frames of psychology and therapy, but this is not a ‘gestalt book’ as such, nor is it meant to be read as an introduction to the approach. Though deeply consonant with gestalt experience, the language and concepts vary from the tradition.

I am writing for a general readership, for fellow explorers and inquirers – any who are awake to the future, its dangers, and its potential. Those who expect a solid core of detached academic-style argument will be disappointed. Gregory Bateson – the author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind – made a pointed remark in his ‘Last Lecture’: he commented that the ‘undoubtedly elegant exchange of intellectual embroidery which occurred at the high table was somehow emotionally dishonest’.² He still used his intellect, but he realised – as I have too – that a mode that splits feeling from thought and emotion from intellect is a mode to question, not copy. Similarly, I may not meet what academics will consider an acceptable standard for justifying my conclusions with ‘hard evidence’; references and footnotes are kept to the minimum. I have written Future Sense as a stimulant to thinking differently; it is a book of practical ideas, an opportunity for readers to think about their own lives, and a proposal for a different kind of activism and new direction for education.

I think of Future Sense in relation to its readers – who are all global citizens. Through exploring how people live, acquire tastes, hold beliefs, and take actions, I have realised how much we are inevitably players, never just observers, and how personal ‘worlds’ are microcosms of the wider world. I intend Future Sense as a ‘bridge book’ between global concerns and the recognisable realities and choices of everyday life.

The book is also an extended appreciation of a priceless human resource – our whole intelligence. In the world at large, the ability of whole intelligence to grow rapidly offers a basis for optimism and hope. I think of Future Sense as beginning a dialogue, opening up some of humanity’s basic qualities for joint enquiry. I hope readers will draw on their own experiences that parallel, contradict, or complement my own.

The Five Explorations of the title will be unveiled in Chapter 2. The book is a result of 20 years of investigating these five ‘dimensions of whole intelligence’. They form the bulk of the book. I have long been asked to write about them in more depth, and finally have done so. The five perspectives I am articulating in Future Sense have largely ‘taken over’ parts of my thinking and my practice as a coach and consultant, with an ever-deepening impact on my personal life as well. I offer them as key themes, which I believe are worth exploring as gateways to a fuller and more empowered existence. They may also provide new language for fields of human practice in education, social affairs, mental health, and human development.

The writing of the book was never going to be easy, yet the experience has been deeply instructive and rewarding. I now offer it to my readers. I say more about my journey of writing in Postscript and Appreciations, at the very end of the book.

Notes

1 There are many introductions to gestalt ideas and philosophy, especially as it has been incorporated into psychotherapy. These include David Mann’s Gestalt Therapy: 100 Key Points and Techniques (Routledge, 2010) and a new introduction by Gordon Wheeler and Lena Axelsson, Gestalt Therapy, Major Theories of Psychotherapy Series (American Psychological Association, 2014). In many people’s eyes, gestalt therapy is simply another specialist form of psychotherapy and coaching. However, its founders’ ambitions were that it would be more widely applied – in education, in organisations, in the public sphere. I believe that much of its thinking can be communicated widely, without diminishing the qualities and carefully nuanced theories of the approach for those invested in them.

2 Gregory Bateson’s ‘Last Lecture’ is in Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a collection of Bateson’s writings edited by Rodney E. Donaldson (Harper Collins, 1991), p. 307.

Chapter 1

Points Of Departure

‘Something has to happen’

One evening, midway though writing this book, I called into my local pub by the River Thames and was soon in conversation with a stranger. He was a chemical engineer, who inspected the safety procedures of oil refineries. He described his ‘world’ and I plied him with questions. He then asked me what I did. I told him I was a psychologist by profession and that I was writing a book about how, living in a world in crisis, we could stay sane, and also perhaps change the world for the better.

I was expecting the usual reactions that followed describing my intention – a bland look and a smile. Instead, he leapt on the topic with passionate intensity: ‘Something has to happen, we cannot go on like this: what stops us from acting intelligently? We need a whole cosmic change, we are paralysed. There’s a job to do, why are we not doing it? What’s wrong with us?’ He had nailed the very subject of my book. ‘Exactly!’, I replied with a measure of relief at finding someone with an equivalent sense of urgency – and frustration.

A week or so earlier, I had understood how difficult it was for people to speak about what was on their minds with regard to the state of the world. I was at a dinner party where the other guests knew each other well, and I felt an outsider. The conversation ranged over their holidays in Italy, the policies of a disliked government minister, and the art work of one of the guests. At some point, one of the guests, without change of voice or emphasis, reported that he was ‘feeling very pessimistic indeed’ about climate change, and that it ‘was probably too late to do anything about it now’; another guest spoke briefly about the fragility of the food supply chain. There were one or two murmurs of agreement, but then the conversation moved on again, to how best to ride a bicycle while carrying a cello. I was struck by the enormity of the topic raised, the speed at which it was dispatched, the silence of the others present, and the apparent need to get back to ‘safe conversation’ as soon as possible – not to mention my complicity in all this by not inviting the speaker to say more: the moment was soon gone.

The engineer involved with oil refineries posed a simple but basic question that cut to the core: ‘What stops us from acting intelligently?’ This is the question at the heart of this book. The answer is not a simple matter of human choice. We also have to attend to the contexts and conditions that we human beings have constructed for ourselves. I’m remembering Winston Churchill’s famous reminder that ‘We shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us’.³ The principle applies to more than our buildings, of course. Our institutions, media, and systems of beliefs – all human creations – also shape us. So, while we may be looking at the qualities and performance of human beings, we shall also need to attend to the conditions in which ‘intelligent actions’ are most likely to develop and flourish, and not be sabotaged, ridiculed, or ignored.

*

The engineer’s questions gave me a nudge. I woke up to the need to share what I have discovered along my career journey and how it is relevant to the global questions.

Professionally, I’ve looked at how people find their purpose, grow their creativity, and change their direction, and how specialists learn to achieve greater heights in their field of endeavour. I’ve observed how teachers draw out the best in others, and witnessed artists and performers shining more brightly when their confidence rises. I’ve been excited when usually sedentary office workers rediscover their sensory and erotic life. And I’ve listened to people’s private longings for a ‘spiritual oasis’ in a desert of triviality and consumerism, even if they find it hard to talk about this in an era that’s stridently secular, and especially when they may have deep misgivings about formalised religions themselves. Out of all that I have noticed, become involved with, or investigated, I have developed a distinct sense of what is possible for humanity: a deepening of understanding, collectively and individually, about ourselves and others, and about what conditions are needed to ‘bring out the best’ in human beings – those with whom we are co-creating the world we experience.

We are in a far stronger position than have been previous generations. The extent of human learning about ourselves has multiplied. There is far greater understanding, for instance, about the effects of trauma, or the impact of stereotyping, or the treatment of mental illness than existed 100 years ago. Many ideas of this book would have been rejected at once even a few decades ago, as irrelevant and bordering on the absurd.

I am not an out-and-out optimist about what is possible for humanity, nor do I believe blindly that ‘all will be well’. Consultants acquire a sense of humility – accepting the complexities and hazards of the change process, even when it is desired or fought for, or when supposed ‘solutions’ seem impeccably rational. Developments occur in so many ways that are impossible to predict and, for an outsider, often hard to comprehend. Yet my sense is that humanity IS advancing overall, and collectively we ARE ‘waking up’ – albeit slowly, and with drifting off to sleep again a not infrequent occurrence.

One thing is certain, though, and is another departure point for the book: human resources and capabilities are under-utilised, and many people under-perform – not through native deficiency or lack of strength, but through lowered self-esteem, or social isolation, or restricted outlooks in which they have become trapped, or because opportunity is simply denied them. Additionally, many of us are distracted by traumatic residues from earlier in our lives. Others amongst us have shattered hopes or entrenched doubts about whether the good will overcome the bad.

While recognising the potential for gloom and despondency, I also know that constructive change is always possible, for I have seen it happen many times. I know that people and groups can learn, alter their priorities, and turn situations around. Life moves on despite stalls and setbacks; the urge to find a way forward is deeply rooted in our being.

*

Several guiding principles are central to the book and to my thinking:

1.Human beings never exist as psychological entities in isolation – they come entwined with their systems, beliefs, traditions, and cultures. To grasp human complexities, we need to think like social ecologists and look at people in their contexts or settings. If people are to change, then so also must the conditions and contexts of their lives. We are not only in contexts, we are part of them. Moreover, we act as contexts for others – we help make up their worlds.

2.We are all of the same embodied animal species and members of the grand tribe called Humanity, and we share more than we realise. While each of